San Diego Life Sciences Roundup: Vical, Fate, Arcturus, and More

Amid favorable market conditions for the life sciences industry, another San Diego biotech has filed to go public. We have details, along with other local developments over the past week.

—San Diego’s Fate Therapeutics revealed plans to raise as much as $69 million through an IPO. Fate Therapeutics, founded to develop stem cell technology, is in mid-stage trials of a it calls ProHema to improve the success of bone marrow transplants, which are often performed on cancer patients whose own bone marrow stem cells have been destroyed by chemotherapy for blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma.

— Another San Diego life sciences company, Sophiris Bio, remains on track for its IPO after completing a 52-1 consolidation of its common shares traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Sophiris has been developing a treatment for benign prostatic hyperplasia, or enlargement of the prostate.

—San Diego’s Vical (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VICL]]) terminated work on its lead drug candidate, a treatment for cancer, after a late-stage trial failed to show that Allovectin was significantly better than chemotherapy. Vical’s stock has been trading around $1.50 a share, after losing $2 a share (about 57 percent) on the news. Vical was developing Allovectin to treat advanced melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. In a statement, Vical CEO Vijay Samant said the company would refocus its resources on its infectious disease vaccine programs.

—Arcturus Therapeutics, a San Diego startup founded earlier this year, said it has acquired

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.